Technological advances and the proliferation of e-commerce have affected the users' retail experience. A growing number of customers are searching for, and purchasing items online. However retail websites often are contain errors causing users to be redirected to an inactive, unavailable, or nonexistent network address. For example, a retailer may provide a website address that is non-existent or inactive website address, or a link on an existing website may redirect users to an inactive, unavailable, or nonexistent website address. Currently, when this occurs, users are redirected to a generic error page which merely informs the user that an error as occurred.
Creating customized web pages corresponding to the “404 File Not Found” error code is known in the art. In particular many Apache web servers allow users to create an .htaccess file which allows users to specify a webpage to display when the web server encounters a “404 File Not Found” error. For example existing customized error pages may contain text explaining that the page cannot be found, a link back to the main website, instructions to return to the previous location, and/or a search box which allows the user to search the retail site.
However, these generic error pages interrupts the flow of the user's retail experience, and the generic error pages do not relate to the website that the user was attempting to reach. It is preferable to provide an error page which allows users to continue their retail experience, and which is customized and/or targeted to the user.